General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This message was self-deleted by its author [View all]Lydia Leftcoast
(48,217 posts)ASKING the insurance companies which laws they are willing to obey.
Having companies help write the laws that will regulate them is the essence of corruption.
Everyone on DU raised a stink when Cheney met with the oil companies behind closed doors, and rightly so.
So why was it OK for Obama to meet with the equally greedy and corrupt insurance companies behind closed doors? He did it before even the broad outlines of the ACA had been released.
Why was it OK to take the weakest possible bargaining position and START by offering what he thought the Republicans might accept? If he had started with single-payer, we might have ended up with a public option. Instead, he dropped both strong positions in favor of Romneycare, and the Republicanites still didn't vote for it.
A president with guts would have gone on TV FIRST and said to the American people,
"I am going to propose a single-payer system to Congress. It will have five main points: 1) Every legal resident of the U.S. will automatically be covered from birth, 2) There will be no deductibles (although there may be modest co-pays), 3) It will be financed by....(there are many possible alternatives, so I'm not naming one here), 4) Doctors and hospitals will still be in private practice, and you will be able to choose any licensed medical practitioner you please, 5) Visitors to the U.S. and illegal immigrants will be provided with care only for life-threatening emergencies and then sent to their home countries for further treatment. They will pay full price for non-emergency care.
"We can have this, just like Canada, the Western European countries, and most of the East Asian countries, if Congress will approve it. The insurance companies will sponsor media campaigns full of horror stories from supermarket tabloids or outright lies. They will try to bribe members of Congress to vote against it. If you want this passed, you need to call or write your House and Senate representatives and tell them that you want America to have not only the best but the most accessible health care in the world."
Then he would have rounded up the Democratic Congresscritters and told them to go to their home districts and reiterate the five points to their constituents in all public appearances. Congresscritters who refused (the Max Baucus types) would be told that the national party would fund a primary challenger who would accuse them of not caring about the health of the American people.
That's what a real leader would have done, not consult an industry about which laws they were willing to obey and make it hard for the public to find out what was in the ACA.
I had to Google like crazy to find an executive summary, and there was none on any government website. I finally found a summary on the website of the Kaiser Family Foundation. That's just wrong: trying to pass a piece of legislation that will affect everybody but leave the average American in the dark about what it contains.
That lack of transparency had three negative effects: 1) It allowed the right-wing to have a field day with horror stories from British and Canadian tabloids, even though the systems of the two countries are different from each other and neither is like the ACA, 2) People who were FOR health care reform THOUGHT that Obama was working on single payer. I heard this again and again, and having read the Kaiser summary, I had to correct them. 3) Since people had no idea what was in the bill, they were not motivated to lobby their Congresscritters.
Our only hope is that the states are able to put together single-payer plans on their own. I will be eligible for Medicare in a couple of years, so even Minnesota's strong effort will be too late for me, but I hope that future Americans, unlike me, won't have to go without medical care because their insurance premiums take up too much of their income.